New CPUs and GPUs. How is the speed?

December 20, 2019

It's been a while since we posted a series of articles about the best hardware for Neat Video noise reduction and for video editing in general. AMD, Intel and NVIDIA have recently released several new CPUs and GPUs, so it’s time to check what speed gains are possible on the newest hardware.

New CPUs tested

Both Intel and AMD have updated their CPUs lines. We’ve had a chance to test some of the new CPUs directly and have also got some NeatBench results from our community (a big Thank you guys!).

CPU

Neat Video 5
Speed FPS*

Num.
Cores

Cache
(MB)

Cache
(MB per
Core)

Base Clock
Frequency
(GHz)

Turbo Boost
Clock
Frequency
(GHz)

Memory
Channels

PCIe
Support
(version,
# of lanes)

Price
(USD)
*approx.

AMD Ryzen TR 3970X

48.7

32

128

4

3.7

4.5

4

4.0 x88

$1999

Intel Core i9-10980XE

33.8

18

24.75

1.38

3.0

4.6

4

3.0 x48

$1100

AMD Ryzen 9 3950X

27.8

16

64

4

3.5

4.7

2

4.0 x16

$830

AMD Ryzen 9 3900X

23.2

12

64

5.3

3.8

4.6

2

4.0 x16

$530

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X

21.1

8

32

4

3.6

4.4

2

4.0 x16

$310

AMD Ryzen 5 3600X

19.3

6

32

5.3

3.8

4.4

2

4.0 x16

$200

AMD Ryzen 5 3600

18.6

6

32

5.3

3.6

4.2

2

4.0 x16

$190

AMD Ryzen TR 1950X

18.5

16

32

2

3.4

4.0

4

3.0 x64

$520

Intel Core i9-9900KS

16.6

8

16

2

4.0

5.0

2

3.0 x16

$630

Intel Core i9-9900K

16.6

8

16

2

3.6

5.0

2

3.0 x16

$490

Intel Core i7-9700K

14.1

8

12

1.5

3.6

4.9

2

3.0 x16

$400

AMD Ryzen 7 2700X

13.4

8

16

2

3.7

4.3

2

3.0 x16

$215

Intel Core i7-8700K

13.2

6

8

1.3

3.7

4.7

2

3.0 x16

$560

AMD Ryzen 5 2600X

11.2

6

16

2.7

3.6

4.2

2

3.0 x16

$125

Intel Core i5-9600K

11.2

6

9

1.5

3.7

4.6

2

3.0 x16

$240

Intel Core i5-8400

10.8

6

9

1.5

2.8

4.0

2

3.0 x16

$200

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X

10.6

8

16

2

3.6

4.0

2

3.0 x16

$290

AMD Ryzen TR 2990WX

10.5

32

64

2

3.0

4.2

4

3.0 x64

$1720

Intel Core i5-9400F

9.2

6

9

1.5

3.6

4.2

2

3.0 x16

$160

Intel Core i3-9100

9

4

6

1.5

3.6

4.2

2

3.0 x16

$150

* Tested on FullHD 32-bit with default filter settings.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X wins this competition with a pretty high score of 48.7 frames per second. In addition to the excellent speed, this CPU is also compatible with PCIe 4 (the newest PCIe), which allows it to use PCIe 4-compatible GPUs more effectively. However, to get this advantage you will also need a motherboard supporting PCIe 4. Intel Core i9-10980XE is the closest competitor with 33.8 FPS, however the price difference is also significant. Intel Core i9-10980XE is $900 cheaper than the Threadripper at the moment, so you have a choice here.

To learn more about the most critical CPU parameters, please check out our previous article that has lots of juicy details.

GPUs battle: Speed or Value?

This time the fastest GPU was NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 42.9 FPS, however AMD Radeon VII did not fall too far from it. And if you compare the prices, 2080 Ti does not look as attractive as it costs — $1200 at the time of writing, while Radeon VII is only $850. The GeForce RTX 2080 and the Radeon RX 5700 XT both give decent results around 35 FPS for a more reasonable price: $720 and $440 respectively.

Other things to keep in mind

A very big contributor to your GPU’s speed is a PCIe bus. When using older versions of PCIe (prior to PCIe 3.0) or a eGPU via Thunderbolt connection, the data exchange between GPUs and the system memory may become bottlenecked and slow down the overall render speed.

If you are thinking about upgrading the whole system, then choose a system with a fast PCIe bus, preferably PCIe 3.0 or PCIe 4.0. The latter is better because each PCI Express 4.0 lane is twice as fast as a PCI Express 3.0 one. The practical choice between these two is currently determined by the number of GPUs that you plan to use in the system. If you are going to use only one GPU, then you can already find suitable PCIe 4.0-based systems on the market, although neither NVIDIA nor AMD have supported PCIe 4.0 in their top GPUs yet. Please note that in order to work at PCIe 4.0 speed all components (CPU, motherboard and GPU) need to support this standard. However if you need two GPUs, then things get a bit more complicated. At the time of this writing, no CPUs and no motherboards are able to support more than one PCIe 4.0 GPU at full speed. In fact, if you are planning to use two fast PCIe 3.0 GPUs (such as RTX 2080 Ti), then you will be better off with a PCIe 3.0 system where both the CPU and the motherboard provide enough PCIe lanes (32 or more). We certainly hope that the situation will improve as PCIe 4.0 support becomes more widespread.

Another thing to keep in mind is the amount and speed of RAM you have in your system. It’s a good idea to have more than 32 GB available. This raises the chances of your video editing software and plugins getting enough memory for their needs. This becomes especially important when working with higher resolution videos such as 4K and larger. Higher memory speed will also contribute to better CPU performance.

Check your system

To find out what your system is capable of at the moment, run our freely available NeatBench tool or run the Optimize Settings tool in Neat Video Performance settings. We would love it if you to send the results to our team (contacts)! The more data our developers have the easier it gets to optimize Neat Video and the quicker you will get your video rendered!

See Also:

GPU card is one of the simplest components to replace in your computer. Often it’s a case of simply removing the old GPU card and slotting in a new, more powerful one. However, there are many GPUs to choose from and some are more equipped for the task of noise reduction than others.

High quality noise reduction is a complex task that is very computationally intensive. Millions of calculations are performed every second and the speed you experience when you use Neat Video depends on key parts of your system working together. For this reason, if you want faster render times and export times with less lag, you should select your hardware very carefully.

As both hardware and software continue to improve very rapidly it may seem as if the life of the film creator is getting easier and easier. However, this is not always the case because increasing consumer expectations means the demand for new video content is also becoming higher every day. The bottom line is that we need to get to the results, faster.